The Chinese Communist Party’s Cognitive Warfare Campaign on American College Campuses

The Chinese Communist Party will again be indoctrinating and spying on students on American college campuses this academic year in an organized effort known as “cognitive warfare.” Its objective is to suppress criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping and his policies, promote CCP propaganda, spy on and intimidate Chinese exchange students, shape American views about the United States, and steal scientific, technological, and military research. 

Confucius Institutes have long played a role in this program. Once numbering over 100, there are now roughly a dozen institutes on American campuses after the US government denounced the program. But the Chinese Student and Scholars Association (CSSA) and other groups have continued China’s cognitive warfare campaign. The US State Department reports that “the CCP created the CSSA to monitor Chinese students and mobilize them against views that dissent from the CCP's stance.” In Chinese language programs on some Ivy League campuses, for example, American students recite from textbooks that call specific religious communities “evil.” At Purdue University in 2021, Chinese spies threatened a graduate student and sent police to intimidate his family in China—an incident that was officially condemned by the university’s then-president, Mitch Daniels. But not all college administrators act to stop CCP interference on their campuses. Many schools may not be aware that the Chinese universities with which they form partnerships are not private institutions, but ones overseen and controlled by the CCP. 

Join Hudson Center for Religious Freedom Director Nina Shea for a discussion on how the US can respond to CCP influence on American college campuses and the threat this influence poses to academic freedom and national security. She will be joined by Ian Oxnevad, senior fellow for foreign affairs and security studies at the National Association of Scholars, and Cynthia Sun, Falun Dafa Information Center researcher and the author of a recent report on CCP influence on university campuses.